This collection contains movies that the Prelinger Archives has digitized and donated to the Internet Archive. The films focus mainly on everyday life, culture, industry, and institutions in North America in the 20th century. The Internet Archive funded preparation, film-to-videotape transfer where needed, and digitization. This is the first time that most of the films have been available to the public. They are available for viewing at no cost and with few restrictions.

Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. This project doesn't directly promote preservation of the original films, since transferring film to videotape and digitizing the video does nothing to ensure the long-term survival of the moving images in their original form. However, by providing near-unrestricted access to films that have previously been difficult to locate or to use, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.

Most of the movies on this site belong to the group of genres known as ephemeral films -- films produced for specific purposes at specific times, not intended for long-term preservation. In their ephemeral nature, these films resemble today's Internet, where a rich stew of socially and culturally significant information is available to all, but there is little guarantee that it will be preserved for the future.